TwitFace Leviathan. (Sounds like a band name, doesn't it? Sadly, it's not.)

Posted here, rather than on the TwitFace, in response to one of the people I admire most, contemplating leaving Facebook for privacy concerns.

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Personally, I am very sympathetic to the opinion that the TwitFace is simply a result of Establishment players successfully and intentionally squatting on the shoulders of the blog phenomenon: historically, if blogs represented an unanticipated move toward open, decentralized (TPTB translate that to "dangerous") freedom and away from the tightly controlled, pre-Internet Establishment media outlets, then social media as we know it now is pretty easy to view as simply a means of re-capturing that monopoly control into a virtualized (and neatly toolkitted) variant of what pre-Internet media had before.

It's frustrating and disheartening, of course, to see how effective and rapid the squatting and marginalizing of the more open, freer frameworks has been; and of course at a personal level nobody likes to be snooped on, even (especially) for his own good. But if we can be appalled at the monopolists happily monopolizing, we can hardly claim surprise.

Yeah, they've got your data--mine too. Ultimately, we gave it to them. Now what? At this point it's not possible to "get it back".

The participation psychology is pretty scary, too, when you think about it. The TwitFace's primary function is to be the place to go not to care about something, but to be seen caring about something, a phenomenon which has now taken on its own name: virtue-signaling. Increasingly social media also seems to have the secondary function of acting as a court of wrongthink. And now we are starting to see the emergence of this latter idea, weaponized, being used as a deliberate political tactic. Scary freakin' stuff.

So, should everyone drop Facebook? Well, arguably yes. It won't get your data back, but delegitimizing the whole horrid idea of a centralized social network may well be the only way to stop it from metastasizing further. Otherwise it's just like an election: we keep participating, so we must be consenting somehow, right?

And yet most of us are already more hard-wired into social media than we care to admit; simply dropping it isn't a trivial step, even beyond the very real phenomenon of I-was-so-disgusted-I-was-just-about-to-drop-it-entirely-when-I-saw-this-post-from-someone-I-haven't-heard-from-in-years-and-I-remembered-why-I-joined-in-the-first-place.

I wrestle with it, but (QED) I'm still here too, just in a darker mode than several years ago. I post just once in a blue moon now (what little I write tends to go to blogs instead), and comment even less, and for the most part I'm a bit fatalistic about what data "they" have on me. Unfollowing nearly everything helps a lot with the outrage fatigue from the newsfeed, but some people are so committed to minding my business that even that can't stop it all.

For me at least, we'll see where it goes from here. The backbreaker may well be this use of the medium as an actual political weapon. If that shit escalates without sane people stopping it, then I've gotta be out--because No. Oh, hell no.

Not holding my breath, either. Instead, I'm trying to spend more time in meatspace. Most people are much more human-like there, than here.

Achieving what is possible, free of the shackles of shame.

Hat tip to Gun Free Zone, via Joel.

Hey Mom!  Look, I haz a dumb.

(Things like this make me miss Will Grigg terribly.  I'd have loved to hear him roast this one.)

Okay, kid, I'll go out on a limb and venture a guess that you don't know Thermopylae from a fever tester.

That level of irony is almost worthy of someone trolling it.  Somehow, though, I don't think I'll hold my breath on the hopes that this person is either trolling directly, or making a more obscure comment about NRA being skippered by pre-emptive surrender monkeys.  Possible, I suppose, in a quantum sort of way (and it would actually be pretty awesome if it was), but not...exactly...likely.

Actually, though, when I saw the picture, the very first thing that went through my mind was this:




Actually, the whole scene is worth a bookmark.  I do remember enjoying that film.




Almost spooky, isn't it?

Maybe the real question, since we know that so much of this (current) feeding frenzy is pure Astroturf, is whether the idea for the kid's unintentionally hilarious sweatshirt originally came from Team Tide Pod*, or from the handlers.  (Frankly, I'm not sure who I'd root for, there, either.  The handlers more richly deserve the egg on the face, but they're just plain not going to heed the lesson no matter what:  ironically the kids stand a much better chance of actually learning something from it all.)


Give the bag to Bozo, kid;  you've taken being played for a fool to a whole new level of achievement.  And in that vein, here's a piece of free advice for the future:  never enter a battle of wits unarmed.


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* Probably, of course, it's just a school mascot sweatshirt, and we're just witnessing a truly amusing karmic coincidence.  But I'd not be surprised, if word of this double-facepalm-fail actually gets around the way it should, to see schools across the nation drop Spartan mascots like the proverbial ton of bricks, for being too inconvenient to the narrative.  (Because the narrative, after all, just wants to go home at the end of its shift.  :-)

Please, stop. I need taller boots for this.

So by complete accident, I recently failed to avoid noticing this:

I try, you see, but sometimes it's just inevitable.

Gaaag.

Sometimes I'm tempted to wonder if it is even theoretically possible for this crowd to be more sanctimoniously self-absorbed and haughtily tone-deaf than they already are.  But the very minute I consider even entertaining the thought, the Weaponize Arrogance Now! crowd comes through once again, like the finely honed machine that it is.

"Can Satire Save the Republic?"  Oh, you mean from the hive mind's metastasizing singularity of abdicated intelligence masquerading as wit and self-arrogated moral superiority over an undifferentiated mass of people they utterly and totally refuse to understand on any level beyond that of a toddler at meltdown?  Well, you know, as an art form, actual satire just might be able to accomplish that--if, you know, it were done well, and pointed at the right target.

And so here they are, this professionally smarter-than-thou crowd, as usual presuming that they've got it all figured out.  Just a little more ridicule and those stupid hicks and cousin-humping rednecks will surely see the light.  It's so self-evidently obvious!  And then we'll be able to avoid all this electoral ugliness next time.

I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but JFC, so many of these people are committed to their onanistic displays of wanton superiority and intrasquad virtue-signaling.  It's bad enough that we've been burdened with the Deep State in the first place, and then with this latest buffoon to figurehead it, without having also to deal with this worse buffoonery of the overeducated useful idiot whose understanding of utopian ideology and elevated sense of self-importance vastly outpaces his understanding of real people in meatspace.

Hell, they don't even understand that the Current Occupant is an intentional buffoon, and yet from what I can tell, they crow with stunningly pathetic pride at all their oh-so-very-clever takedowns of what may be the ultimate straw man.


And man, is it annoying when I then sound (to myself at least) like I'm somehow defending that smarmy buffoon, or his "supporters", or even "the Republic" itself.  I'm not, of course.  But this hive-mind gambit--to somehow manage to be worse than all that, with new levels of sanctimonious smuggery backed up by childishly facile tone-deafness in practice--is, at least arguably, working.

Grigg is gone.

Sometimes, even God gets selfish.

If you'll forgive the crudity, this nevertheless sums it up just about perfectly:

The irony is that Grigg could have done it better without being crude.

There's a hole in the freedomverse today, and it's a big one.  I find it extremely telling that within just a few hours, I have seen more love for Will Grigg pass by my Facebook feed, than I have seen attention paid to any single person or event since I entered the TwitFace space just about ten years ago now.  It's difficult to explain how someone I never met in meatspace could become so important in my life, but anyone who spends any amount of time reading these pages will not fail to run across Grigg's name with some regularity.  I'd like to think that does not happen by accident.

I could go on and stumble for the words myself, but Dan Sanchez did a pretty fine job summing up the je ne sais quoi of Grigg's style, in an article for FEE today:

Each essay he wrote was a masterpiece of erudition and eloquence, precision and passion. He did not hurl invective. He simply described each official injustice exactly, stripped of all euphemism, as one would a crime committed by any “mundane” outside of the “punitive priesthood” and devoid of “blue privilege,” to use three of his many incisive coinages. He would illuminate the matter by drawing fascinating parallels from his expansive knowledge of history, literature, and popular culture: especially science fiction, which he loved. And he would slice to pieces the officious justifications of official victimizers with his razor-sharp reason. He was, bar none, the best writer in the liberty movement. And in his painstakingly produced podcast Freedom Zealot and his many interviews with Scott Horton, he seemed to craft final-draft prose as he spoke.

Yes, that.  All of that.  And for me, there is one other thing, too:  William Grigg was an actual living manifestation of something that is otherwise at least arguably an impossible enigma:  a true, literal Christian libertarian.  What I am usually used to is that the acceptance of God as the ultimate benign authoritarian, will ultimately and always trump the libertarian impulse at some point in the continuum;  but then somehow there was Constant Will, never budging from a libertarianism so beautifully radical it could easily be called the oh-so-naughty A-word...and yet somehow his devoutness was never in question--maybe it's because he always made it seem so personally, individually voluntary.  I found that inspiring and impressive, even alongside his more obvious stylistic brilliance.

He leaves behind a world that desperately needs him, but which seems even more desperate to ignore him.  "Those malignant bastards" do not deserve to breathe any easier for not having Will around any more, calling them out in his gloriously plain, honest language for what they are.

Somehow, in light of this terrible news, I am reminded of something I heard him say more than once:

This is a man.  Take notes.

He always said that about others--certainly worthy others--but based on everything I have learned about the man through his writing and social media presence, the sentiment is absolutely made for him.

Let me put it this way:  my own son will get the notes I have taken.

Rest in peace, Will, and thank you eternally for the attitude.

This is the TwitFace in toto.

I suppose one could try to make the point better than this, but why?  It's all there.

And what a blissful silence it would be.